Fleur Fisher Reads has tagged me for a photo meme.
“Find your 5th photo file folder, then the 5th photo in that file folder. Then pass the meme to 5 people.”
Almost all my photos are of my boys, but I was pleased to find it was this one:
My youngest son and his little friends! Mine’s the one with all the hair in the middle!
I’m going to pass this one on to:
Lou from Lous_Pages
Teddy Rose from So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
The Cellist of Sarajevo is set during the siege of Sarajevo, which took place from April 5th, 1992 to February 29th, 1996, and is the longest city siege in modern warfare. The inspiration for the book came from the true story of a cellist who decided to play on the site of a mortar attack every day for three weeks, to honor his neighbours killed in the blast. While the book is fiction, it is based upon many true accounts of what life was like during the siege.
The book follows three main characters trying to live out their lives under constant fear of attack. The sights, sounds, and sheer terror of everyday life for these people was brought across very vividly. It was very well written and easy to follow, but I felt that the use of three different characters fragmentated the book too much. It wasn’t long enough to develop each of their characters fully, and so no real story could develop.
If you’d like to get a sense of what life was like for these people during the siege, then this is a great book to read, but I wish that it had been longer, and included more of a plot.
The Moonstone was first published in 1868, and is considered to be the first detective novel ever written. Many people site The Moonstone as the longest piece of detective fiction in existence. I’m not an expert on this, but I do know that it took me a long time to read it! At 464 pages it only just classes as a chunkster, but I feel no guilt in counting it towards the Chunkster Challenge as the type was tiny!
The story takes place in an English country house, in which a rare diamond is stolen over night. The suspects are therefore limited, and a famous London detective is called in to investigate the crime.
The writing was easy to follow, but it was very dense, and so it was a slow read. For the majority of the book this wasn’t a bad thing, as I loved the descriptions, but there was a slow section in the middle, which I found hard to get through. It picked up towards the end though, and the it was very well plotted. I didn’t see any of the twists coming, and I liked the realism of it. There were also a lot of other issues raised during the book. SPOILER! Highlight text to read. I loved the beginning and ending in India, and the way Wilkie Collins challenged racial stereotypes by portraying the Indians as mysterious thieves, when they were the good ones all along.
I also found the opium factor interesting. I had no idea of it’s affects, and have since learnt that Wilkie Collins was writing from experience, as he had an opium habit.
I loved reading it so soon after The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher as I noticed all the similarities between the real murder at Road Hill and the theft of the moonstone. If you’ve read The Moonstone then it is worth having a look at this analysis – I found it very insightful. It contains lots of spoilers, so don’t click through if you’re interested in reading the book soon.
Overall, I enjoyed reading The Moonstone. It was hard work at times, but well worth the effort. As it’s the first ever detective novel I can’t not recommend it, everyone should read it at some point!
This weeks Weekly Geeks task is to interview our favourite character from a book.
There are lots of characters I’d like to interview, but it would give away too much of the plot to those people who haven’t read the book. So I decided on my favourite children’s character – The Gruffalo.
I love The Gruffalo, and the sequel The Gruffalo’s Child. If you haven’t read them, then you should really try to have a look at a copy (or buy one for any toddlers you have in the family). They are the cleverest picture books I have ever seen.
I think I’ll stop there! I feel really silly doing this – it was great to give it a try though. I look forward to seeing what all the other ‘weekly geekers’ have come up with!
The Blog Improvement Project challenge this week is to update the basic parts of our blog – improve the blog roll, the ‘about me’ page and the archive section.
As part of this project I’d like to create a page on my blog to show all the books I’ve reviewed. Ideally I’d like all the books displayed alphabetically by author. Does anyone have a widget which does this automatically?
How do you archive all your book reviews? Has anyone seen a really good way of doing it? All help greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
The Bolter is a non-fiction biography of Idina Sackville, a woman who scandalised 1920s society by marrying five times and having numerous love affairs.
Idina had a really interesting life, but this book fails to capture the essence of the woman. The writing is quite dry, and at times very boring. I think this book would have benefited from being written as a piece of historical fiction, so that some life could be breathed into each of the characters. I would have loved to have had a greater insight into the thoughts and feelings of Idina, instead of a list of two-dimensional people she met.
The reader also wasn’t credited with much intelligence, and I found myself being irritated by over-explanation of many things. I think the worst offender was this:
“He hadn’t seen him for five months, almost half a year.”
Overall, I was very disappointed by this book. The back cover makes it sound so interesting, but ultimately it failed to live up to my expectations.
